I have to admit, I’m impressed. Wayward Pines‘ series premiere was solid if uneven, but the show seems to be really hitting its stride with “Don’t Discuss Your Life Before.” There are parts where Pines still struggles against its own premise, but I’m not going to sit here and tell you that “Before” wasn’t a pretty damn good hour of television.
For one thing, the pacing is better. The series premiere vacillated between slow exposition and fast-moving revelations, so it’s a good sign to see Pines settling into a groove. It seems as though the show is going to move along at its own conversational pace (there are still some issues near the end, but we’ll address that in due time). My other concern was plot: “Where Paradise Is Home” had a lot of it, which sometimes worked to its detriment, so I thought that if “Before” didn’t want to stop the narrative in its tracks, it was going to have to cram a shit ton of plot into forty-two minutes. Pleasingly, this is not the case. “Before” succeeds with its less-is-more approach; it affords the cast some breathing room, and lets the town gain a personality of its own.
The plot of “Don’t Discuss Your Life Before” is pretty straightforward: Ethan and Beverly start making plans to escape. That’s the long and short of it. Ethan’s imprisonment is becoming more obvious (to the point where he’s ordered to not even leave his hotel room), which is a smart move on the show’s part. It adds desperation and urgency to the escape plan, the details of which Ethan finds in a notebook belonging to the late Bill Evans. The mystery around Evans continues to deepen; Evans’ widow Patricia tells Ethan that she saw him commit suicide, while Beverly tells him that Sheriff Pope publicly executed Bill for trying to escape. (Side note: I’m really enjoying Terence Howard as Pope. In a lesser actor’s hands, Pope would be a strutting peacock of a villain, but Howard wisely chooses to underplay him. Howard’s voice and inflection hint at a backstory to Pope that I want to know, but that I hope the show doesn’t show us. He seems like he’s just doing his duty, and he has a soul under all his menace; when he tells Ethan not to go to the hospital, it sounds more like a plea than an order.)
When Ethan and Beverly begin their escape in earnest, “Before” edges Wayward Pines closer and closer to appointment television territory. I could easily see this being a water-cooler show, if people still congregated at water coolers instead of brewing their own kombucha. Director Charlotte Sieling, a veteran of famously tense shows like The Americans, has a blast with a dinner that’s pleasant on the surface but simmering with suspicion underneath. Juliette Lewis uses her eyes and lips to convey Beverly’s terror, which turns out to be perfectly reasonable; as soon as she and Ethan leave Kate and Harold’s house, every phone in the neighborhood starts ringing all at once, which is a wonderfully creepy image. The chase is on; Ethan escapes, but Beverly doesn’t, and like Bill before her, she’s executed by Sheriff Pope.
It takes more than a “holy shit” moment to make a good episode, but I will say that I was surprised that Wayward Pines would kill off a character in the second episode – and in such ignoble fashion. What I find myself wondering now is, how can the show sustain its premise? The mob was looking for Beverly and Ethan, and Ethan killed one of his pursuers. Is he just on the run from now on? I feel like that constricts the show somewhat, but on the other hand, if he just quietly returns to his hotel room with no fuss, that would undermine the hivemind mentality of the citizens. At this point, I’m inclined to give the show the benefit of the doubt.
A Few Thoughts:
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Some dialogue is still pretty clunky. Beverly gets the worst of it, as she’s saddled with lines like “The more you see the less anything makes sense in this town.” No shit
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I didn’t mention it in the review, but I actually liked Theresa’s subplot. Going to Boise to track down Ethan is a much better use of her character than having her stay at home calling Ethan’s boss over and over
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The “previously on” for this show is long as hell
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